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English councils have increased spending on family support services since the start of the decade following years of stagnation, an analysis has found.

Annual real-terms spending grew by 21% from 2020-21 to 2023-24, compared with 2% from 2014-15 to 2020-21, found research on early intervention funding carried out for the Children’s Charities Coalition (Action for Children, Barnardo’s, the Children’s Society, National Children’s Bureau and NSPCC).

The analysis, by research firm Pro Bono Economics, found that spending on early intervention services in general – Sure Start centres, youth services and family support – grew by 13% (just over £300m) in real-terms from 2020-21 to 2023-24.

Family support compared with statutory social care spending

This was driven by growth in family support spending specifically, which increased from £1.44bn in 2020-21 to £1.74bn in 2023-24, in real-terms.

Despite the increase, family support spending was well below councils’ net expenditure on safeguarding children (about £3.3bn) and looked-after children (£7.7bn) in 2023-24.

The government’s children’s social care reforms, which are being rolled out from this month, are designed to engineer a shift in the balance of spending towards early intervention by enabling more children to remain, safely, with their families, through improved support.

New model of working with families

Under the Families First Partnership programme, councils are expected to set up multidisciplinary family help teams with responsibility for families with multiple and complex needs who previously would have come under targeted early help, child in need or child protection services.

The model is designed to provide families with a consistent practitioner – a family help lead practitioner (FHLP) – to carry out direct work and co-ordinate other services, to enable the family to receive tailored support as early as possible.

While new multi-agency child protection teams will be responsible for carrying out enquiries under section 47 of the Children Act 1989 and other safeguarding functions, family help teams and FLHPs will remain involved and continue to provide support to the family in those circumstances.

Additional funding for prevention

The reforms are backed by a £270m children’s social care prevention grant, which councils are expected to combine with £253.5m previously spent on the Supporting Families programme to develop and rollout the new approach.

Around £13m of the £270m grant is designed to fund the expansion of family group decision making meetings, under which extended families come together to make decisions about how children should be safeguarded where statutory services have concerns.

Under the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which is currently going through Parliament, councils must offer families an FGDM meeting whenever they are considering issuing care proceedings, to provide family networks with the opportunity to identify alternatives to the child going into care.

“Substantial work” is needed to improve the recording and reporting of data on family group conferences (FGCs,) ahead of an expected increase in their use on the back of government legislation.

That was among the conclusions of a study commissioned by Department for Education-funded evidence body Foundations into council approaches to collecting and analysing data on FGCs.

It comes with the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill set to introduce a duty for councils to offer families a family group decision making (FGDM) meeting – an umbrella term for FGC-style provision – when they are considering issuing care proceedings.

On the back of the research, published this week, Foundations has commissioned charities Coram and the Family Rights Group (FRG) to collect data from councils, on a voluntary basis, on access to, and take up of, FGCs, as part of wider research.

Impact of FGCs on preventing children going into care

In a children’s services context, FGCs are family-led meetings, organised by a practitioner (the FGC co-ordinator), giving extended families the opportunity to make plans for children where there are concerns about their safety and wellbeing. They are generally in-house council services, though some authorities outsource the function.

Previous Foundations-commissioned research, published in 2023, found children whose families were referred to an FGC at the pre-proceedings stage were significantly less likely to be in care 12 months later than those whose families were not so referred.

The finding is one of the key factors behind the government’s planned duty, which is likely to lead to a significant increase in the use of FGCs.

‘Very little information’ on how councils record FGC data

The 2023 study found that, though the vast majority of English councils offered FGCs at the pre-proceedings stage, there was “very little information on what or how local authorities recorded or reported on [them]” and no routinely collected data on the extent to which they were offered and taken up.

As a result, it was not possible to know who was receiving the service and what their outcomes were.

The latest study, produced by Coram, the FRG, FGC provider Daybreak and sector data organisation Data 2 Insight, was designed to understand what data councils collected on FGCs, particularly  at pre-proceedings, the enablers and barriers to them collecting and reporting on data and how a national data collection may be developed.

It involved in-depth site visits to three councils, interviews with staff from 10 other authorities, two parent-carer discussions and analysis of previous work on FGC data collection.

‘Substantial work’ needed on improving data

The study concluded that “substantial work” was needed to improve both the recording and reporting of FGC data by councils.

Councils recorded a range of data, including on referrals, the planning of FGCs, conference meetings, including attendance, FGC plans and reviews and feedback from families and professionals at closure, including views on outcomes.

In some areas, almost all FGC information was recorded on the children’s social care case management system (CMS), often in a specific microsite, while in others, only limited information was stored on CMS, meaning they used spreadsheets “extensively”.

There were advantages and disadvantages to each approach, the study said. While services that predominantly used spreadsheets were able to create and adapt these easily to capture all the information they required, “data entry was manual and therefore required significant capacity”, the report said.

But while services that relied more on CMS required less manual data entry, it was difficult for them to customise FGC data collection, meaning they did not record all of the information they wanted. Also, CMS were much more difficult to adapt and change than spreadsheets, with FGC services sometimes waiting years for changes.

Variation in data quality

There was “substantial variation in the quality of FGC data and in data quality assurance processes”, the report said.

Some services were “quite limited” in what they did to quality assure their data, while others did regular audits of FGC data on their CMS to check for errors or inconsistencies.

Challenges for councils included recording FGC data for each child within a family where they each had separate records on the CMS, and situations when the child was not known to children’s social care and so was not on the CMS. The latter situation tended to result in data being saved outside the case management system.

Data reporting was largely focused on workflow and outputs, such as the number and origins of referrals, the proportion of referrals that resulted in an FGC, the number of FGC meetings and plans completed and details of who attended.

Limited analysis of equity of provision

While services often looked at why families did not take up an FGC, most did not carry out detailed analysis of the factors influencing refusal, such as the characteristics of the family and the point at which a conference were offered.

No council studied looked at equity of access or provision of an FGC, for example, based on the legal status of the child or family demographics compared to the wider population, mainly because of the lack of population-wide data.

“As a result, services were limited in their ability to look at access, especially in terms of equity, diversity, and inclusion,” the research report said.

There was also “limited data” reported on the content of FGC plans, other than to report that the plan had been agreed, sent to families and uploaded onto the CMS.

Lack of reporting on outcomes

While some services reported on satisfaction children’s families’ and professionals’ satisfaction with FGCs, this was stymied by low response rates to feedback, while there was a lack of reporting  on outcomes or impact because of difficulties measuring these.

And though some services looked at measures such as the legal status or living arrangements of the child six or 12 months after an FGC, most acknowledged that it was difficult to attribute these outcomes to an FGC given the many other factors that could have contributed.

FGC service representatives interviewed generally wanted a national data collection to provide benchmarking information, including to measure the impact they were having on social care outcomes for children and any potential cost savings.

However, they raised concerns about how this would work, including because of the differences in FGC services between areas and the difficulties in measuring outcomes.

Creating a national data collection

The study recommended a phased approach to creating a national data collection, which should be co-designed with the sector, account for variations between services and minimise burdens on local authorities.

It said this should start with a voluntary survey of councils to collect aggregated data, without details about individual children or families, which could pave the way for a national data collection of child-level information.

This is being taken forward by Foundations, as part of research it has commissioned from Coram and FRG on how FGCs are offered to families in England and the factors influencing their decision to accept or reject the offer.

National survey of local authorities

Coram and FRG are carrying out a voluntary survey of councils, which covers:

• What an FGC looks like in their area, the process is for making referrals, the number of children that were subject to an FGC referral in 2023-24 and information about them.
• The process around how FGCs are offered to parent/carers, the number of FGCs consented to in 2023-24, the number children in these cases and information about these children.
• The number of FGCs that took place in 2023-24, the number of children involved and information about the children, along with the the number of FGCs that did not take place in 2023-24 and reasons for this.

Data is being collected via an excel template, which can be obtained by emailing Impactandevaluation@coram.org.uk.

The deadline for the data collection is Friday 4 April 2025 and returns should be emailed to Impactandevaluation@coram.org.uk.

Data collection ‘critical’ for ensuring success of policy

Foundations chief executive Jo Casebourne said the collection would “build a clearer picture of what is happening with FGCs across the country and support local authorities to ensure that they are not only accessible but also make a real difference for families and children”.

FRG chief executive Cathy Ashley stressed that the new research was “critical for ensuring the new national family group decision making offer and future policy changes will have real, lasting impact”.

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Poverty and homelessness are driving demand for children’s social care, directors have warned.

Lack of adequate housing, welfare reforms and families lacking access to public funds are adding to pressures on children’s services, an Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS) survey has found.

The findings come from the ADCS’s latest Safeguarding Pressures* research, its regular stocktake on the state of children’s social care in England, and were shared in a submission to the government’s child poverty taskforce.

The taskforce was set up last year to develop a cross-government strategy to alleviate child poverty, which is due this spring. It is examining how the government can increase household incomes, including through welfare reforms that raise employment levels and reduce poverty, help bring down the cost of essential goods and alleviate the negative impacts of poverty.

Rising levels of child poverty

As of 2022-23, 4.3m – or 30% of – children were in relative poverty in the UK, meaning they lived in a household whose income was below 60% of the average after taking account of housing costs. This is up from 27% of children in 2021-22 (source: Institute for Fiscal Studies).

In its submission, the ADCS cited past research that has identified a strong link between levels of deprivation in an area and children’s social care involvement (Bywaters et al), and said the Safeguarding Pressures survey had found increasing demand driven by poverty.

Poverty driving demand for children’s social care

Based on responses from 86 of the 153 authorities, the survey, carried out last year, found:

• Almost three-quarters had seen demand from families in poverty rise as a result of welfare reforms, particularly among larger families with three or more children. This is likely related to the introduction in 2017 of a two-child cap on household claims for child tax credit or universal credit.
• Nearly two-thirds said that poverty-driven demand has grown from families where one or more parents were in work.
• 59% said that increased demand on services was being driven by poor quality housing, while 61% reported increased safeguarding activity linked with homelessness and 54% said that demand on children’s social care was being driven by housing need amongst homeless young people.
• Almost half said service demand had risen in relation to families with no recourse to public funds (NRPF), who are unable to access benefits or help with housing due to their immigration status.

‘Incalculable’ impact of poverty on childhood

“The impact of poverty on childhood is incalculable, children arrive at school hungry and are unable to focus on learning, families are queuing up at food banks and schools are routinely buying coats, shoes and even washing clothes for pupils and their families,” the ADCS said.

“ADCS members believe that failure to address child poverty risks undermining the success of a range of planned reforms right across government.”

*The full results of the latest wave of the Safeguarding Pressures series will be published shortly.

There has been an almost sevenfold increase in the number of children placed in unregistered homes in England over the past three years, Ofsted data has shown.

The number placed in confirmed unregistered children’s homes rose from 147 in 2020-21 to 982 in 2023-24. Over that time, the number of such homes identified by Ofsted increased from 144 to 931.

[Source: Ofsted (2024) Unregistered children’s homes]

Unregistered homes ‘typically of poor quality’

It is illegal to provide care and accommodation to a child without registering as a children’s home, and any provider that does not register is committing an offence, which generally triggers a warning letter from the regulator.

The increased use of registered placements comes despite Ofsted finding that they were typically of “poor quality”. This was evidenced by the fact that just 6% of unregistered settings applied to register with Ofsted after receiving a warning letter, with a mere 8% of these applications being approved.

Deprivation of liberty orders

One factor behind the rise in the number of unregistered placements is councils’ increasing use of deprivation of liberty orders – obtained from the High Court – for children with very complex needs or at high risk.

Many of these young people are placed in unregistered placements because of the lack of alternatives, including the severe shortage of secure children’s homes.

However, while Ofsted recorded a rise in the number of children on deprivation of liberty orders placed in unregistered settings, they accounted for just 12% of cases in 2023-24 and 15% in each of 2022-23 and 2021-22.

‘An indictment of the state of social care’

As a result, the increase in the use of unregistered homes is likely to reflect the lack of available placements for looked-after children more generally. This is the result of factors including the falling number of mainstream fostering households, the mismatch between the location of children’s homes and need, and the historically high numbers of children in care.

Children in care charity Become described the rise in the use of unregistered homes as “a real indictment of the current state of children’s social care”.

Chief executive Katharine Sacks-Jones said it meant that “hundreds of children who’ve experienced trauma are not being provided with the specialist, quality care they need, and instead are living in illegal and often completely unsuitable accommodation with limited support”.

Proposals to help Ofsted crack down on unregistered homes

The news comes with the government having announced plans for Ofsted to take swifter enforcement action against providers of unregistered placements.

Under these, the regulator, which has welcomed the proposals, would be given powers to fine providers, as an alternative to criminal prosecutions.

Sacks-Jones added: “The government’s recent proposals to address the issue of unregistered homes is welcome, but this latest data shows how urgently and robustly the government must act.

“We must see stronger scrutiny and enforcement so that all children are able to live in safe homes and receive the high-quality care and support they need to thrive.”

ADCS voices concerns over government plan

However, the proposals sparked concerns from Association of Directors of Children’s Services president Andy Smith, in his speech to last week’s National Children and Adult Services Conference.

“In an ideal world, we would want all placements to be in good quality registered settings, yet the reality is that the current framework of regulation does not allow us to effectively meet the needs of some of our most vulnerable children who have highly complex needs,” Smith said.

“Before we start to turn the dial in the wrong direction and issue civil proceedings against providers, we need to make sure that we have the right services in the right place to meet need.”

A proposed dataset on the work of approved mental health professionals (AMHPs) has the potential to showcase the value of the role and secure much-needed investment for it, service heads have said.

The AMHP Leads Network made the comment after the Local Government Association launched a project to scope out the feasibility of developing a national minimum dataset for AMHP work, completed on a voluntary basis by councils and NHS bodies.

The LGA recently tendered for a professional lead, with operational AMHP experience, to engage with stakeholders and develop a proof of concept for the dataset.

The AMHP Leads Network said this built on work it had carried out with the government’s Office of the Chief Social Worker looking at the scope of such a data collection, and added that the idea was also supported by the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services (ADASS).

Existing AMHP data and what it misses

Currently, Skills for Care publishes annual data on the AMHP workforce and NHS England produces yearly statistics on the use of the Mental Health Act 1983, the latest of which showed  a 7.7% drop in the number of people detained under the MHA, which followed a 5.7% fall the previous year.

Most such detentions will have been based on an application from an AMHP following an assessment by the practitioner, agreed with two doctors, that the criteria for detaining the person under the relevant section are met and detention is the most appropriate way of providing care and treatment to the person.

However, despite the decline in the number of detained people, the leads network has argued that demand for AMHP work is increasing year on year, with a rise in the number of requests under section 13 of the MHA for a practitioner to consider a person’s case where it is deemed detention may be required.

In many such cases, AMHPs do not make an application under the MHA but find less restrictive alternatives to detention for the person; however, this work is not captured in existing datasets.

Dataset ‘essential in securing investment for AMHPs’

“While individual AMHP services, local authorities and mental health trusts will all be collecting a variety of AMHP-related data, there is no single dataset that describes the totality of the work AMHPs do,” the network said.

“It is our belief that by collecting the actual demands made on AMHP services, the sources of such referrals, the demographics of those referred, and the pressures in the system, this dataset has the potential to act as a barometer for the health of the whole mental health system not just our AMHP services.”

It added: “When combined with the annual Skills for Care AMHP workforce survey, we see this dataset as essential in securing much needed investment in the AMHP workforce, in particular the challenge we make to local authorities and mental health trusts to work together on coherent local AMHP succession plans that maximise the routes to AMHP training and practice for social work, nursing, occupational therapy and psychology colleagues. This dataset has the potential also to show the value AMHPs can bring to securing less restrictive outcomes for those we serve.”

The LGA’s tender for the professional lead to lead the initial work on the project has now closed.